Chapter 31.

Soren by beabadoobee

"Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world, to become that manifestation for the sake of another. This is a great, demanding task; it calls one to expand one's horizon greatly. Only in this sense, as the task to work on themselves, day and night, and to listen, ought young people use the love granted them. Opening one's self, and surrendering, and every kind of communion is not for them yet; they must for a very, very long time gather and harbor experience. It is the final goal, perhaps one which human beings as yet hardly ever seek to attain.

"Young people often err, and that intensely so, in this way, since it is their nature to be impatient: They throw themselves at each other when love comes upon them. They fragment themselves, just as they are, in all of their disarray and confusion. But what is to follow? What should fate do if this takes root, this heap of half-broken things that they call togetherness and that they would like to call their happiness?

"What of their future? Everyone loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other and many others that would yet have wished to come. They lose perspective and limit opportunities... It is true that many young people who do not love rightly, who simply surrender themselves and leave no room for aloneness, experience the depressing feeling of failure. They would, in their own personal way, like to turn their condition into something meaningful and fruitful. Their nature tells them that questions of love can be solved less easily than everything else usually considered important, and certainly not publicly or by this or that agreement. Questions of love are personal, intimate questions, from one person to another, that in every case require a new, a special, and an exclusively personal answer. But then, having already thrown themselves together, having set no boundaries between each other, and being no longer able to differentiate, they no longer possess anything of their own. How can they on their own find the escape route that they have already blocked to that inner solitude?

"They act from a source of mutual helplessness. If, with the best of intentions, they wish to avoid the convention that is approaching them they find themselves in the clutches of another conventional solution, one less obvious, but just as deadly...

"Whoever will seriously consider the question of love will find that, as with the question of death, difficult as it is, there is no enlightened answer, no solution, not the hint of a path has yet been found... The responsibility that the difficult work of love demands of our evolvement overwhelms us; it is larger than life. We, as yet beginners, are not equal to it. If we persevere after all, and take this love upon us, accepting it as a burden and a time of training, instead of losing ourselves to the frivolous and careless game behind which people have hidden themselves, not willing to face the most serious question of their being-- than perhaps shall a small bit of progress be perceptible as well as some relief for those to come after us. That would be a great deal."

"I believe that this idea of love remains so strong and mighty in your memory because it was your first deep experience of aloneness."

An Excerpt from

"Letters to a Young Poet"

By Rainer Maria Rilke